Ghosts in the Morning

Chapter 10



The mobile phone stared up at me from the table, willing me to pick it up. It wasn’t mine, it was Graham’s, I really shouldn’t, spying wasn’t a good thing, but still...

Graham really must be out of sorts. Firstly, his change at the weekend, what with Sunday lunch and a walk on the beach, and this behaviour had continued for several days now, he had been far nicer, more attentive, than he had been in a long while. And now this; it was unheard of for him to forget to take his phone with him to work, I couldn’t remember one single occasion when this had happened before, he usually checked he had his phone before he worried about his keys.

There had to be a reason why Graham was acting like this, a reason why he was acting like he actually cared about me, about us as a family. I knew I was guilty of a high degree of cynicism but that didn’t mean it was misplaced. I knew that his head was normally full of Nikki, so why the sudden change?

I picked up the phone and saw that it needed a pass code to unlock it. I typed in the digits of Graham’s birthday backwards – I knew it would be the same as the Sky PIN number, Graham didn’t have the imagination to use anything else. It would be the same number for all of his bank cards too.

Hey, presto. I thumbed to the text messages and scrolled down. There were a few texts from Piers and from Harry, one of the guys that Graham played badminton with. There were also a few messages from ‘Work’. I shook my head and said ‘he must think I’m bloody stupid’ – his important work colleagues, the ones who would ring him, were in his phone by their own names, not some generic ‘Work’ caption. It had to be Nikki.

I clicked on the most recent ‘Work’ message.



Yes, Graham, I am seeing some1 else, so pls dont call again



I sighed. Things were beginning to make sense. I clicked on the previous ‘Work’ message.



I think we shld cool it a bit, U R married remembr!



So that was it. He must have phoned her after the “cool it” text and she had felt forced to confirm that she was seeing someone else. I could imagine how it had panned out; Nikki had started to pull away from Graham - maybe she’d had her fun, maybe he’d spent some money on her - but now the cold, harsh reality of the situation had sunken in. She had seen that she was wasting her time with an older, married man and she had decided to break it off. Perhaps Graham had started to get needy, I could sense the threat in her last text, or maybe she had genuinely met someone else.

But one thing was sure- it explained why Graham was suddenly being kind to me. He was feeling vulnerable, lonely. In spite of everything, I felt a hint of pity for Graham rising in me. He was obviously feeling rejected. Probably he was feeling depressed but he had managed to hide it well, to carry on as normal. And at the time of his suffering, when he needed some support, he had turned to me. Despite everything, I was his rock, his anchor.

I bit my lip and immediately the pity dissipated. I dug my nails into my palms. How could I feel sorry for him? He had been cheating on me, and now that his dozy tart had dumped him, he wanted to come back to the safety of the family womb, with his tail between his legs? And he had the gall to think that I would just pat his little puppy head and say, ‘there, there, it’s alright, Andrea’s here, baby’. Well, no f*cking way.

The TV was on in the lounge, with the sound on mute. I turned it up. The local weather was on, and the usual woman forecaster was back. She looked even more tanned than usual, maybe she had been to the Caribbean, this time of year was supposed to be the best – weather-wise – for there. Graham and I had discussed going on holiday there once, years ago, but right at the time where we came to book it, he saw a story in the newspaper about a couple getting beaten up and robbed in one of the islands, and he decided it wasn’t safe. ‘It sounds bloody dangerous, it’s not a great time of year for me to be away from the office, and it’s bloody expensive as well’, he had said.

I wondered if the salary of a local weather forecaster allowed for expensive Caribbean holidays, though perhaps she had a rich boyfriend; she was pretty enough, in a cheap kind of way, to attract one. A lot of young men these days seemed to go for that type - girls who looked like they spent their time at the hairdressers and beauty salons, and wore big earrings. I noticed that she wasn’t married, there was no wedding ring. No-one seemed to get married these days, but I couldn’t blame them really.

‘So that’s the weather outlook for today. Now, back to Chris with a re-cap of the headlines.’

She clasped her hands together and smiled into the camera. Her short-sleeved blouse rode up her arms and you could just see the beginnings of a tattoo. A Chinese or Japanese symbol, they were all the rage with the young girls these days. I thought they looked ugly. Clare - ‘Clay’ - at the care home had a tattoo of a heart on the inside of her arm. She had done it with a compass and some Quink.

‘Thank you, Jodie, so here is a summary of today’s headlines for the Channel Islands. Local bank, Brantis, has confirmed that it will be laying off forty members of its workforce. Brantis is one of Jersey’s largest private employers, employing approximately eight hundred people across the Channel Islands. It is believed that jobs will be lost in both Jersey and Guernsey, but a spokesman for Brantis said that they had yet to confirm the specific details. And here in Jersey, a promising young football player has been killed in what police are describing as a brutal attack – ’

Football player? I was surprised, he certainly looked more like a rugby player.

‘- the body of the twenty-one year old man, who has been named as Philip Tolley, was found on the West Road. It is understood that the man was walking in the direction of Mizzi’s nightclub, a venue that has only been recently opened in Litten Square. Mr. Tolley was described as a gentle giant by his family, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and the police have urged anyone with any information regarding this incident to come forward. The police have described Mr. Tolley’s death as ‘tragic and needless’. Details of the number to call are on the screen now. And, in other news – ’

I hit the mute button and glanced at the clock. There wouldn’t be much other news – the local news only merited eight minutes or so, tacked on the end of the ‘real’ news, and those eight minutes had to encompass the local sport and weather.

‘Tragic and needless’, that’s what the newscaster had said, but it sounded blasé, just a cliché that was trotted out without feeling. I mean there were so many things in life that met this description. I could see the banner scrolling across the television now, displaying the headlines of the real news; they were saying that five hundred people had been killed in an uprising in the Middle East, and eighty people have been killed in an earthquake and there, look, twenty thousand people have died in an ongoing famine, so what makes Philip Tolley’s death so important, what makes his death so tragic and needless compared to those famine victims, what makes his death so important?

They said he was a ‘gentle giant’, but I knew that he wasn’t. That was just another one of those trite clichés that they wheeled out when something like this happens. He wasn’t gentle, he wasn’t nice, he was malicious and cruel, his death wasn’t tragic and needless, he deserved it.

I turned the TV off, and a tiny part of me wondered if I was going a little bit mad.